COVID Word Diary
When an explorer enters a new terrain with astonishing new features in the environment, they need to find the words to apply to what they have discovered. When the world enters a new situation, such as a pandemic, the expansion of our collective vocabulary to meet it is inevitable.
Words are pulled into service from all quarters. There were the official words like COVID-19, a name chosen by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses. There were the medical terms that we suddenly came to know: community transmission, cough cloud, P2 mask, superspreader, surge capacity and virtual hospital.
And there were the terms created by governments dealing with the crisis: COVID safe, digital contact tracing, e-vaccination certificate, pandemic leave, traffic light border pass, travel bubble. There were the words that surfaced in the politics surrounding the event: anti-masker, economic hibernation, snapback, flattening the curve, mask diplomacy, single source of truth, sovcit.
Then there were the social effects: apocaholism, choice fatigue, coronaphobia, doomscrolling, lockdown fatigue, coronavirus clapping, elbow bump, social distancing, hybrid office, corona baby, elopement wedding, corona truther, quarantine style, revenge travel.
But there was also humour, albeit sometimes black: bin outing, boomer remover, coronacoma, Coronageddon, fakeaway, hamsterkauf, quarantini. There were colloquialisms that made us feel that we were cool about it all: the Rona, quazza, iso, hanny san. And events like doughnut day and V-day and Freedom Day.
This COVID Word Diary tracks the flow of this new vocabulary through the months of the pandemic. As always a diary is a record of events. Dipping into it reminds of us what happened when, and perhaps of what our feelings and responses were at any given point.
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